**2. Materials and Methods**

#### *2.1. Study Area*

The city of Ningbo is an important port on the southeast coast of China, located in the eastern part of Zhejiang province and the southern wing of the Yangtze River Delta. It is adjacent to Qiantang River and Hangzhou Bay in the north, the city of Shaoxing in the west, the city of Taizhou in the south, and the city of Zhoushan in the east across the sea. The terrain is high in the southwest and low in the northeast, and the height difference is about 1000 m. There are two mountain ranges in the city, Siming Mountain and Tiantai Mountain. Hills and mountains above 50 m account for 57% of the total land area. It is one of the 14 coastal cities opened to the rest of the world, and an important city in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration [17]. The total land area of the city was 9816 km2, the population was approximately 8.5 million, and its GDP was CNY 1240.87 billion in 2020 [18]. Rapid population and economic growth have resulted in high demand for industrial and residential space, leading to unprecedented PLES evolution that poses serious challenges to ecosystems and the natural environment. Regional environmental risk at Ningbo has increased substantially over the past 40 years and will increase over the next several decades with the increasing demands of economic and social development on territorial space resources. The resource bottlenecks and environmental pressure are becoming increasingly prominent, and the contradiction between the supply and demand of land space resources is becoming progressively obvious [19–21]. Ningbo has attracted attention from environmentalists, local authorities, and scientists. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to construct an ecological civilization. For the past 10 years, while the PS and LS in Ningbo have been expanding, the ES has been shrinking, and PLES contradictions in Ningbo are prominent. How to coordinate the relationship between development, livability, and protection; improve the coordinated development level of PLES in function; and promote the coordinated and sustainable development of the economy, society, and ecology are major issues for the development of Ningbo.

#### *2.2. Research Framework*

Based on the characteristics of geographical scale dependence, this study was undertaken to diagnose PLES conflicts from two aspects using a multiscale integration method: administrative-unit scale and the spatial grid scale. The administrative-unit scale highlights the sustainability of PLES, based on the sustainable development goals (SDGs), while the spatial grid scale focuses on the functional suitability of PLES. The administrative-unit scale detects PLES conflicts from the macroscopic perspective on the basis of sustainable utilization of PLES, whereas the spatial grid scale more accurately reflects the microscopic and detailed functional differences of PLES, compensating for the lack of the strong generality of the microscopic scales. Thus, the research framework was developed as follows:

Step 1: explore PLES spatiotemporal variation on the basis of PLES grid data at 1 × 1 km.

Step 2: evaluate PLES suitability on the grid scale and quantify the synergetic degree using the coupling and coordination model.

Step 2: quantify PLES sustainable development evaluation on the administration-cell scale using the coupling and coordination model.

Step 3: diagnose PLES conflicts using the multiscale integration model to combine the evaluation of the synergetic degree of PLES on the grid and administration-cell scales.
